how now brownpau
The latest on the sniper case: John Allen Muhammad, John Lee Malvo and a tree stump have been arrested. The tree stump is currently being interrogated by federal agents, and has confessed to masterminding the whole affair.
Update: They were arraigned on gun charges in a federal court right here in Baltimore. No wonder I’m hearing all those helicopters.
Oh, wait. There are always helicopters.
I just received a comment to an older entry about “Dr. Rebecca Brown” and the dangers of her books on Satanism and curse theology. After my links to The Bizarre Case of Rebecca Brown, and the clear proof of her dangerous mental instabilities, the commenter says that he prefers to continue believing in her, and admonishes me to trust in Jesus.
I respond with a harrumph. Please let me reiterate that I am an evangelical Christian, saved through faith in Christ alone. However, that does not mean that I am compelled by my faith to subscribe to Rebecca Brown’s hallucinations of demons, Wiccans and Satanists. We are to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good, and in testing Rebecca Brown (by the way, her real name is Ruth Bailey), I have found her falsified paranoid religious frothing to be far from good.
Some content of her books is very much in line with Scripture: that Christians can claim the victory of Jesus over the forces of Satan, that we are to avoid the dangers of occultism and necromancy, and that rock and roll music is a deadly, poisoning evil. (Ha! Just checking to see if you were listening.) However, the more dubious attributes of her theology: admonitions to avoid “demon-god” Hawaiian floral garlands and African wall hangings; the process of “anointing” people, objects, furniture, even pets, with cooking oil to ceremonially cleanse them of demonic influence; her raving stories of demons and angels speaking to her and her patients in person; Satan’s schemes to make vegetarians more susceptible to possession by depriving them of the protein needed to fight demons; or her questionable views of the Trinity (the Father not feeling what the Son has experienced) — these are well beyond anything that the Bible gives to us as believers.
Rebecca Brown’s teachings go well beyond mere fundamentalism. I dare say she even crosses the line into the very cultism which she strains to avoid.
For more information: The Bizarre Case of Dr. Rebecca Brown, The Lies of Dr. Rebecca Brown, and The Curse of Curse Theology.
I was up till 6am this morning to work on a storyboard assignment, so I kept TNT on for company.
Highlights of the night: Darkman, with Liam Neeson being so deliberately campy that I was in stitches; and The Black Hole, which I remember vividly from my childhood, owing to hours spent hand-cranking the Disney cartridge through a Fisher Price Movie Viewer. The whole film, V.I.N.C.E.N.T. droids and all, was deja vu all over again, and I think I nearly relived my entire preschool life.
(The part where Maximillian the Robot cuts up Anthony Perkins was especially poignant, considering that I had just watched Impostor the day before.)
Now I’m really, really sleepy.
Tempus Fugit. I’ve always dreamed of talking to a visitor from the 19th Century in this fashion. Why are the good time travel stories always set in October? ;)
Okay, I know I said a few days ago that the news outfits were overreacting to this sniper business, but considering that the guy is now making serious threats, and has managed to continue the killing spree while eluding authorities till now, I’d say there’s now sufficient precedent for the media frenzy. Not to say that it’s helping public calm. Or the investigation. To see nothing but “Sniper on the Loose” on CNN borders on silly tedium.
Don’t panic! After all, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” Pray for the victims and their families; and pray that the sniper’s plans may be foiled, that his guns jam, that his bullets all miss, and that he be brought to justice.
Update: Big, cheap, fast ratings, that’s what it’s all about, says Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Link via bene d.
Those of you who’ve been reading my blog carefully will remember that I went to a CultureFlux party last week. Well, I just got an email telling me that I won one of their raffle prizes: Arena Stage tickets for the Fall Playreading series, featuring Wendy Wassertein and other Pullitzer Prize winners. I’m not very much into theater. Should I be very excited?
Daylight Saving Time ends this Sunday, so be sure to set your clocks back an hour on that day. Remember, you heard it here first.
What if I told you that Abraham Lincoln was not only a great president, but also a magical miracle worker? That he healed wounded Union soldiers with a touch, and glowed with a heavenly aura, such that the Confederates could barely stand to look at his shining radiance? What if I told you that he did not stay dead after Booth shot him, but rose from the grave a week later, with liberty and justice for all on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line?
You would rightly think me utterly insane. Lincoln has been dead for 137 years; far less than enough to erase the sensible truth of his life and times.
Jesus had not even been gone thirty years when the earliest documents about him were written. Yet they contained astounding, even incredible, claims of healings, transfigurations, and resurrections. And the eyewitnesses to those stories attested to every single word of it — even to death.
Now, do we begin to see how improbable it is that “embellished” myths could have arisen so soon after the events related in Scripture? As improbable as me telling you that Abraham Lincoln was a Messiah.
(Speaking of which, be sure to check out Calpundit’s “fisking” of Gettysburg. Hilarious.)
“Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua.” I don’t think the discovery of this inscription is quite as sensational an archaeological find as the media is making it out to be, but it’s an interesting bit nonetheless, further corroborating with the Protestant — and early Christian — tradition that Saint James was indeed Jesus’ younger brother. (This may be a serious problem, however, for Roman Catholics who insist on Mary’s perpetual virginity.)
Update: See? It was fake.
Of course, one wonders why there’s all this hubbub about “proof of Jesus’ existence” when we have several perfectly legitimate documents written by his own disciples within decades of his crucifixion and resurrection. It’s called the New Testament. (And no, the “Lost Gospel of Thomas” is not part of it, for those of you who’ve been watching too much Stigmata.)
Mathowie is quick to jump into the MeFi thread with a common fallacy, “Oh, Jesus existed, but his miracles are just legends that grew with the passing of time.” Completely missing the fact that the Gospel accounts are reliable to within decades of the events related — not even separated by a generation! — and written by people who had everything to lose and no reason to lie.
There’s a lot of documentary proof for the existence of Jesus, and even pragmatic skeptics acknowledge the bare minimum — non-supernatural — evidence. But the reactions on MeFi consist, of course, of the usual kneejerk iconoclasm. More opinions formed from movies like Dogma than from any real sense of reverence or respect — for deities or people. Sometimes I feel like MeFi threads are just contests of “How cleverly can you offend the Christians.”